DJ CO #3

Today I observed Mrs. Kim's listening class. She taught the class just like our class: first she wrote the lesson plan on the board. Then, she explained what the lesson was, and rationalized for the students why they were learning it. She was telling them that listening is important for the TOEFL exam and being able to understand conversation. She gave an example of one way that context clues can help by saying that if an article has a picture of a tree on it, maybe the article is about biology or nature. Then the students went off on a very interesting tangent. Mrs. Kim explained that in Korea, you don't turn a year old on your birthday. Instead, every Korean turns a year older on the New Year. She said this was for cultural purposes, since in Korea the verbs change depending on if you are talking to someone older than you. This is also why it is ok to ask someone their age in Korea. This way, if you know what year someone was born, you know if they are older than you(whereas in America, you can be older or younger than someone born in the same year.) Instead of letting the students raise their hands to answer questions, she called on them. This way, the students all had a chance to speak. Before the lesson, she did a schema building technique. The lesson was about learning, and the schema build was a few questions about pictures of children learning. She then went over the vocabulary. I noticed that if the students were just weakly guessing the word, she would not count that as them knowing it. Only if they were confident did it count. Then she asked me to read the passage aloud, so I did. There was a lot of partner discussions. The vocabulary was to be learned with a partner, and the questions at the end of the article were as well. She asked "Is it clear" many times. I think it is good to ask it in this way, instead of "Do you understand?". By asking "is it clear", the teacher is placing the responsibility on herself by saying "am i doing a good job of conveying this question?" instead of "are you doing a good job of understanding this question?". She also paused at the end of her sentences to let the students finish them. She asked the questions out loud instead of having the students read them.